Ubisoft’s Steep may not have turned the extreme sports genre on its head, but it did offer a unique, visually impressive open-world snowboarding (and skiing) experience for fans of the genre. It also offered a comparatively realistic take on what braving extreme conditions might be like, an appreciated contrast from SSX‘s consistently over-the-top, uber trick-laden mayhem (which I absolutely can’t wait for more of, by the way).
Steep has been scheduled to arrive on Nintendo Switch for a while now, but a release date has never been discussed. According to a source of IGN France, the Switch edition may actually have fallen on difficult times of late. Here’s what IGN France has learned.
According to our information, this lack of news regarding the Switch version of Steep would be due to big difficulties to run the game on the console of Nintendo . The development would still be ongoing, and Ubisoft would work hand in hand with the Japanese manufacturer to successfully carry this port, especially on the side of online features.
A source close to the record told us that ” at the moment, we can not promise to exit on Switch. “
Ubisoft has confirmed that the game is still part of the Switch line-up, but that the editor has no further comments to make.
The translation is a bit rough, but the gist of IGN France’s report is that development on Steep‘s Switch edition appears to have hit something of a temporary roadblock. It’s not terribly uncommon for Nintendo to step in and offer aid to particular development partners, and it’s not as though Ubisoft and Nintendo haven’t collaborated strongly and recently either (Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle being the most obvious example). Still, Steep is an Ubisoft third-party game through-and-through, making Nintendo’s direct involvement a bit strange nonetheless.
Nintendo’s website doesn’t go so far as to promise Steep will arrive on Switch during 2017, while Ubisoft’s initial announcement of a Switch edition prior to IGN’s report seemed to imply that it would. Regardless, an extreme sports title on Switch is a much-welcomed change of pace to the system’s current lineup – let’s just hope Ubisoft Annecy doesn’t have to cut too many corners to make it happen.
